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Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Galactica's Shadow Season Will Have to Wait For Another Day

SciFi.com has made available the deleted scenes from Battlestar Galactica's winter season (second item on 6/6/06). Now we too can watch such vital segments as Lee's first meeting with Shevon from "Black Market", or an extra two seconds of dialogue from "Scar" (there are also some cut scenes from "The Captain's Hand", but the new interface--something called SciFi Pulse--is quite dreadful. It crashed Safari on every single attempt I made at it, and I eventually gave up with most of the deleted scenes unwatched. Windows users might have a better time of it). There's no sign, of course, of the season's more vital deleted scenes, which kept showing up in the 'previously on Battlestar Galatica' segment--Kara pitching a Caprican rescue mission, or Baltar and Gina's meeting in "Lay Down Your Burdens I".

Strangely enough, I'm relieved by the absence of these scenes. They indicate that Galactica's producers are capable of a well-deserved humility. For three months they served up a substandard product while constantly offering tantalizing hints of the superior show that might have existed had they not chosen otherwise, and seemed to feel no shame for doing so. To now offer up these vital scenes as an extra special treat for the viewers (and this might be a good time to commend Galactica's production staff and SciFi.com for their rare and admirable willingness to acknowledge that offering free goodies--deleted scenes, episode commentaries, entire episodes--for online download is a good way to get viewers interested in and committed to their shows) would demonstrate a breathtaking lack of self-awareness. To put it simply, I'd like to believe that the folks at the Galactica office are a little embarrassed at how the winter season turned out, and aren't willing to draw attention, yet again, to its deficiencies.